According to Kathleen Wall of the museum at Plymouth, Mass., the colonists and their Wampanoag guests in 1621 ate shellfish and wildfowl, perhaps with herbs and berries, but their meat was accompanied by no potatoes.

The heat went out at home on Sunday night, though I did not mention it before bedtime. Instead, I put a space heater in the coldest bedroom of the house and hoped the rest of the rooms would not get too cold before a repairman arrived in the morning.

I feel like one of Emily Dickinson’s birds that stay, now that someone whose advice I valued and whose actions in my behalf over the years to a great degree have contributed to the feelings of good fortune I entertain these days has died.

Going to the internet to read what commentators have been saying about what the Trump administration might mean for the press, I was stunned by these words on the back of a black T-shirt worn by a man at a Trump rally: “Rope.Tree. Journalist. Some...

As we awoke to Donald J. Trump as president-elect of the United States yesterday morning, my best hope was that we would be able to count on his penchant for changing his mind. He is nothing if not fickle.

One of the puzzles about clamming is how slowly it goes at the start. It happens almost every time: No matter when or where I go, after I step into the water and drop my rake I find nothing for several long minutes. Then, there is a familiar clunk...

I’m a sucker for aesthetics. I’m the kind of guy who would live in a modernist glass cube because it looks cool, no matter how inconvenient. I judge books by their covers and products by their packing and I would rather have a mediocre dinner at a...

Leo the pig has put on quite a few pounds since the last time I wrote about him. As pigs do, he grew fat this spring and summer, grazing on the lawn, then munched with pleasure on the black cherries, acorns, and beach plums that reached the ground...

Mary said they’d discontinued her makeup, and I said the things we liked seemed always to be discontinued, like the fleecy warm-up pants I just had had sewn, and which I’ll wear every day now until the end of eternity.